Casual Dining: Chand Palace

Sarah Musgrave, Gazette Casual-Dining Critic06.26.2012

The pani puri appetizer (left), aloo ghobi cauliflower and potato (right) and hot onion uthappam (centre) were part of a meal that made dining at Chand Palace a pleasure from start to finish.Pierre Obendrauf
/ THE GAZETTE

MONTREAL - There’s a lot of movement in Park Extension these days, on the restaurant front in particular. India Beau Village has relocated to new digs, Punjab Palace is papered over with placards announcing its imminent reopening, Maison India Curry has a revamped sign, and long-standing vegetarian hole in the wall Pushap has turned into Punjab Sweets (and, perhaps most newsworthy of all, it looks like the floor has been scrubbed). Walking past Curry and Naan, which I had positively reviewed after it opened last year, I noticed it has been replaced with Chand Palace.

As it turns out, while the place came under new ownership two months ago, it looks pretty much the same inside. And at first, my queries were met with reassurances that nothing has been altered. “Just the name is different,” our server said, “the menu and the staff in the kitchen are the same.” Probing further, it was revealed that actually, yes, there were a few new dishes on the list, specifically the addition of a South Indian section. And this address is now BYOB rather than liquor licensed, which means stepping out to the nearby basement dep for a bottle (a depressing store with a spirit-bolstering selection of imported beers including Bitburger, Red Stripe and Stella in cans). The servers are also new, and if the clientele was 90 per cent non-Indian on the night we were there, they seemed to be used to dealing with that. Our knowledgeable waitress, anyway, didn’t dumb it down for us – she recommended the hot stuff, and we liked her for it.

Among the appetizers, pani puri was one item I didn’t remember seeing here before (although I still vividly recall the cool, yogourt-laced dahi vada, which remains on offer). The puri came a half dozen to the plate, looking like puffed-up sand dollars, open at the tops to form tiny cups. Into the hollow shells we spooned the spice water, as the waitress called it, and that’s pretty much what it was – thin and watery, with a tart, sour, tangy fruitiness. It’s something ladies love to snack on at the market, we were told, where vendors will fill them before serving them to you. It makes sense that it’s a popular street treat, because it’s a mixture of savoury and sweet, sustenance and hydration, with a cooling effect. You put the whole thing into your mouth at once, which makes sense, too.

When it came to mains, we bee-lined for the southern dishes. The thin, crisped crepes called dosas are a classic, for good reason. Chand’s masoor masala dosa, stuffed with potatoes and red lentils, the edges folded in to keep it from trailing off the plate, was delicious and filling. It came with fluffy coconut chutney, liquidy green mint chutney, and sambar, a warm and earthy lentil concoction that’s not particularly concerned about whether it’s a soup or a gravy.

Another regional specialty worth investigating, uthappam is a pancake with vegetables cooked into it. The batter is made with lentil flour and rice flour, which comes out thick, soft and a little bit spongy, punctuated with tiny holes. The hot onion version had a scattering of translucent onions and biting green chilies sinking into the surface, while the underside was browned – earning it the descriptor of Indian pizza. This was also slated for dipping into sambar and the coconut chutney, and it didn’t take long to start eating it with our hands.

We rounded out the meal with one meat and one vegetable selection. Chicken 65 reminded me of Westernized Chinese dishes like pineapple chicken or General Tao. The texture of the fried chunks was overly firm, the sauce played some obvious sweet sour notes, but the fresh curry leaves, flash-fried to retain their shape, were absolutely alluring and addictive. As for the garish safety-orange shade, I hoped it was something more natural than food colouring. Anyway, it’s always interesting to see how Chinese dishes have travelled and been reinterpreted all over the world, and this strangely appealing entry was Indo-Chi to our Can-Chi.

A metal bowl of aloo ghobi contained huge florets of gently crunchy cauliflower and cubes of softened potato, full of the aroma of roasted spices. The rice was different than before: supersize basmati with a noticeable longer grain and wider girth than usual. The naan was still very good, fresh, floppy and faintly charred.

Chand Palace was a real pleasure from start to finish. Dessert of ras malai, made with paneer and cream and topped with crumbled pistachios, was cool enough in the middle to remind me of a semifreddo, an echo of the weather on an early summer night in Parc Ex.

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